At Ballston Quarter in Virginia, shoppers will soon be able to find everything from Adidas sneakers to zinc lozenges amid 360,000 square feet of retail space spread over three levels. One thing they won’t find is the word “mall.”

The former Ballston Common Mall recently scrubbed the four-letter word from its name, part of a makeover designed to obscure that it is, well, in fact, a mall.

“The...

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